Trying to Improve Silence by Sentences

Skipping, Finding, and Forgetting

@ A Coffee Shop, Barista playing songs through speakers using Spotify (?)

As the music played, there were some moments when a song began and it was soon skipped for the next one. Intervals of time for each skip were different; as if some songs took more consideration than others.

Skipping is a seemingly simple yet complicated activity. In considering an unfamiliar piece, one makes a judgement of the past, present, and future.

Take the barista for instance.

She took what she was listening to (present), compared and contrasted what she heard from her own gathered tastes (past), and gauged whether it would be worth listening to in its entirety (future).

This all happens so quickly that each step melds into one action.

—–

A song plays that I am not aware of. Taking out my phone, I retrieve the song and artist within a couple seconds.

Whether an app tells us the song or a search engine identifies one through a sliver of lyrics, knowledge is always within our grasp. We can never not know.

Why, it would have to be a deliberate choice not to find out what was playing.

I heard an unfamiliar tune at the shop that I enjoyed. Decided not to discover what it was. Even if I were to discard the song later, there was a fear of not knowing, of letting it drift into the ether.

I let it drift. As I type this I have no recollection of the song. Any regret of not figuring it out faded out of mind.

Would have knowing the song been worth it?

—–

As I took out phone to figure a song out, static fluttered in the speaker next to me. Song still played yet it was wading in a buzz. In moving my phone I noticed that the intensity of the static directly corresponded to how I manipulated the device.

Concerned by my own noisemaking, I retired my phone at a distance from the speaker. How odd that in using the phone to find a song I would in turn distort the song and through the noise still identify it.